Eva Sleeps

Europa Editions
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously.
Copyright © 2010 by Francesca Melandri, All rights reserved
Published by arrangement with Marco Vigevani & Associati Agenzia Letteraria
First publication 2016 by Europa Editions
Translation by Katherine Gregor
Original Title:
Eva dorme
Translation copyright © 2016 by Europa Editions
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
Cover Art by Emanuele Ragnisco
www.mekkanografici.com
Cover photo © Sally Mundy/Trevillion Images
ISBN 9781609453237

Francesca Melandri

EVA SLEEPS

Translated from the Italian
by Katherine Gregor

To my children, happy multilinguists,
and two dads full of love: theirs and mine.

“One evening in the
Stube
, old Sonner put an end to the usual mumblings about betrayal, saying, ‘It's all nonsense!
Even children know we won the war. But I would never have dreamed that they'd give us the whole of Italy!'”
—C
LAUS
G
ATTERER
,
Bel paese, brutta gente
“But, I mean, they're all Germans there!”
—M
ARIANO
R
UMOR
, after a holiday in Val Pusteria
in 1968 revealed to him the existence
of a language minority in the country
of which he was Prime Minister.
“So you're Italians ruled by Germans? Lucky you!”
—I
NDRO
M
ONTANELLI
“Call the world, if you please the ‘vale of Soul-making.'
Then you will find out the use of the world.”
—J
OHN
K
EATS
, Letter to George and Georgiana Keats
“Let Eve (for I have drench'd her eyes)
Here sleep below, while thou to foresight wak'st.”
—J
OHN
M
ILTON
, Paradise Lost, book XI

I
t was a small parcel wrapped in brown paper and tied with thin string. The names of the addressee and the sender were in neat handwriting. Gerda recognized it immediately. “
I nimms net,
” she told Udo, the postman. I'm not taking it.

“But it's for Eva—”

“I'm her mother. I know she doesn't want it.”

Udo nearly asked if she was sure. But she looked up at him with her transparent, almond-shaped eyes and stood there, motionless, staring at him. He said nothing. He took a pen out of his breast pocket and a form from the leather bag. He handed them to her, without looking her in the face. “Sign here.”

Gerda signed. Then, suddenly gentle, she asked, “So what's going to happen to this parcel now?”

“I'll take it back to the sorting office and tell them you don't want it”

“That Eva doesn't want it.”

“—and they'll send it back.”

Udo put the parcel back into his leather bag, folded the form, and slipped it in with the other papers. He replaced the pen in his breast pocket after checking that it was closed securely. He was about to leave. The upper part of his body was already turning toward the road and his feet were about to follow when he had one last scruple. “Where's Eva, anyway?”

“Eva is sleeping.”

 

The brown parcel traveled backwards along the road it had taken to arrive at that spot: two thousand, seven hundred and ninety-four kilometers in total, there and back.

I
f anyone had asked Hermann, Gerda's father, if he had ever known love (no one ever did, least of all his wife Johanna), the image of his mother standing at the entrance of the barn, handing him the bucket of lukewarm milk from the first milking, would have flashed before him. He'd sink his face into the sweet liquid and raise it again, a creamy mustache on his upper lip, before setting off on the hour-long walk to school. Only after covering a certain distance would he wipe his lip with his wrist. When Sepp Schwingshackl joined him from his
maso
¹
to walk with him. Or, when along came Paul Staggl, who was the poorest boy in the whole school—his father's
maso
was not only uphill but north-facing, so never got any sun in the winter. Or, if he'd tried thinking about it (something he never did in all his life, except for just one time, and then died immediately afterwards), he would have remembered his mother's hand, cool but also as rough as old wood, cupped over his childish cheek in a gesture of total acceptance. By the time Gerda was born, though, Hermann had long ago lost love. Perhaps he'd lost it on the way, like the hay in his dream.

The first time, he was a boy, but then the dream recurred throughout the rest of his life. His mother was spreading a large white sheet on the field, filling it with freshly scythed hay. Then she closed it by bringing together and tying the four corners, and put it on his shoulders, so he would carry it to the barn. It was a huge load but he didn't care. His mother had given it to him, so the weight was all right. He would walk up from the scythed field, swaying, like a monster flower. His mother watched him with her blue, almond-shaped eyes—the same eyes as Hermann, then his daughter Gerda, and also her daughter, Eva. Stern, gentle eyes like in some portraits of Gothic saints. However, another Hermann—ageless and invisible—realized with alarm that the corners of the large cloth weren't tied properly and that he was shedding hay behind him on the ground. A few stalks would fly out at first, then entire handfuls. The Hermann who saw and knew everything couldn't alert the Hermann who was the character in the dream, so when the latter reached the barn, his bundle would be empty.

The first night he dreamed this, the peace treaty was being signed in Saint-Germain, with which the victorious powers of the Great War—France, especially—wishing to punish the dying Austrian empire, assigned South Tyrol to Italy. Italy was very surprised. There had always been talk of liberating Trento and Trieste, but never Bolzano—let alone Bozen. It was perfectly logical. South Tyroleans were German people, perfectly at ease in the Austro-Hungarian empire, and didn't need anyone to liberate them. Even so, after a war that had certainly not been won on the battlefield, Italy ended up with that stretch of the Alps as their unexpected booty.

That same night, his parents died three hours apart, swept away by the Spanish flu. The following morning, Hermann found himself orphaned, just like his land, South Tyrol, deprived of its
Vaterland
, Austria.

After their parents' death, Hans, the eldest brother, inherited the old
maso
. The property consisted of a house with a
Stube
²
blackened by smoke, a barn full of wood beetles, a field so steep that in order to cut the hay you had to put your weight on one leg at a time, land so poor and vertical that it kept having to be carried back up on your shoulders in a wicker basket after every rainy season had sent a large part of it sliding down to the lowest point of the field. And Hans was the lucky one.

The three elder sisters got married in a rush, just so they could sleep under a roof they could call their own. Hermann, the youngest, had to go and be a
Knecht
, a servant, in the wealthier
masos
, the ones with level slopes you could scythe with your weight on both legs. The ones where the land stayed in its place even after a heavy downpour, and didn't slide down into the valley. He was eleven years old.

Every night, until he was twenty, never having been away from his mother for more than half a day, he wet the bed from fear and loneliness. In winter, in the drafty loft where the masters made
Knechte
like him sleep, Hermann would wake up enveloped in his own frozen urine, as in a shroud. When he got up from the straw mattress, the thin tegument would shatter with a light crackle.

It was the sound of loneliness, of shame, of loss, of homesickness.

J
et lag is worse when you travel East. That's what everybody says. When you go against the sun, they say it then retaliates by depriving you of sleep. As if I had sleep to waste.

Carlo is coming to pick me up at Munich Airport, but I can't tell my mother, because I know she doesn't like him. She's never liked him. Maybe it's because when I first introduced him, he didn't try to butter her up, not even a little. He was just polite. Still, we must remember that he's an engineer, so his job is to take things literally. Otherwise, the bridges and viaducts he builds wouldn't stay up. He probably thinks I'd take his chivalry toward my mother as a slight. How little he knows about me. About me and, especially, about her.

I introduced him ten years ago. We'd gone to visit her for All Souls weekend and she'd had us at Ruthi's—my
patin's
³
—farm. She'd installed herself in the fir-lined
Stube,
looking like something in a tourist office brochure. She was wearing a lace blouse under the boiled wool jacket with the buttons made of bone. Only thing more Tyrolean than that would have to be a
Dirndl
. Maybe she was keen on being seen by Carlo in that setting that was ever so rustic and picturesque, like a staging of her own identity—even though, to tell the truth, she's never been a peasant.

Carlo talked to her, enquired after her health, and held the door open for her when we went out. However, he never stared into her eyes and laughed, never told her that now he could see who I got my beauty from, and, what's worse, did not agree to play a hand of
Watten
. And that was something my mother has really not forgiven him. Carlo justified himself by saying he didn't know the rules of that particular card game. The rules! He really hadn't understood a thing.

That's why I don't take him to visit her anymore. She doesn't like Carlo, but not because he's married or because he has three children I've never met. And not even because, in the eleven years we've been together, he's never mentioned the possibility of divorcing his wife.

These aren't the things that matter to my mother.

 

I come out through the glass door of International Arrivals. A fifty-something man is pushing my luggage cart: Jack Radcliffe, from Bridgeport, Connecticut, a farming machinery manufacturer on temporary transfer to Munich for a trade fair. Tall, salt and pepper hair, impeccable navy-blue suit. As for me, even after a nine-hour flight, I'm dressed and made up as if for the New York art previews, which is indeed where I'm coming from. Pistachio green Donna Karan jersey ensemble, pendant earrings, pumps. We make quite a handsome couple. Shame about the American's slightly beady eyes and that purplish nose (he enjoyed the in-flight bar service). When Carlo sees him next to me, he rolls his beautiful dark eyes, as though asking the sky to witness the stamina needed to keep up with a woman like me.

The American, on the other hand, takes a while to work out that someone has come to pick me up, or maybe I forgot to inform him. In any case, he stops smiling. It's as though he's watching the fantasies he's entertained about me melt away in the presence of another man, like ice in a glass of whisky you've been holding too long. His eyes become even more translucent—tearful almost—as he gradually realizes that this handsome, Latin-looking man is there for me. Without any surprise or embarrassment, Carlo shakes his hand, thanks him for helping me with my baggage, then sweeps me away with those broad shoulders of his I still like so much.

As I walk away, my arm around him, I turn to look back, flash him an encouraging smile, wiggle my fingers and twitter, “See you later, Jack!”

That's enough to confuse athe baggage cart and, as a matter of fact, Jack Radcliffe, of Bridgeport, Connecticut, remains in the Arrivals Hall, devastated by incomprehension even more than disappointment.